Dice Bucket Engines - why?

Morrus · Sep 25, 2017

Yeah, a dice pool will be a bell curve of outcomes whereas a d20 is a flat probability. A d20 is more swingy.

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Morrus · Sep 25, 2017

Ancalagon said:
[MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] True, but if that is a concern you can replace the d20 with 3d6 (or something like that). Probabilities around the average can be achieved without a dice pool no?

3d6 is a dice pool.

The Crimson Binome · Sep 25, 2017

Ancalagon said:
@Saelorn True, but if that is a concern you can replace the d20 with 3d6 (or something like that). Probabilities around the average can be achieved without a dice pool no?

It depends on how narrow you want your distribution. Rolling three dice is less uncertain than rolling one die, but it's still more uncertain than rolling twenty dice.

There are lots of ways you could mess with a system, depending on how you want to juggle personal preferences. I'm a big fan of taking average results, instead of rolling large numbers of dice, for example. You could get most of the benefit of an Exalted or Shadowrun system, while making it faster to run, if you cap the number of rolled dice at six and just averaged out the rest. Instead of rolling eighteen dice, you could just count six automatic successes and roll six more dice (although I understand that Exalted, in particular, makes it a pain to determine what the average result should be).

Ancalagon · Sep 26, 2017

Morrus said:
The term is “dice pool”. If the system doesn’t make the mistake of creating too large unwieldy dice pools, adding or removing a physical die is a really easy, intuitive, tactile version of a modifier.

YMMV, of course. I like them (I use d6 dice pools in WOIN) but everybody has different tastes.

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Morrus said:
3d6 is a dice pool.

... are we talking about the same thing? This is not what I meant at all.

3d6 instead of a d20 is something Gurps does, for example (and HERO as well). You roll 3d6, you add them up, and compare it to your skill (you try to roll "under", it's a roll low is good system). It's always 3d6 - it doesn't matter if you are good, bad, strong, have a magic sword whatever. Because you roll 3d6 instead of a d20, the chances of rolling an "average-ish" roll are higher than a d20, it's not a flat distribution.

In a dice pool the number of dice is variable (depends on your skills, abilities, favorable circumstances etc) and each dice individually is check to see if it succeeds (exalted: a 7 or higher on a d10). You then add up the number of successes to see how well you did. Some tasks will require multiple successes to be successful - the number of success is the "DC". This is totally different than the 3d6 system I just described.

... what is your definition of a dice pool? I'm genuinely confused.

Ancalagon · Sep 26, 2017

Jhaelen said:
I also dislike systems using 'buckets of dice', but not all dice-pool systems are like that.
As you do in Runequest.
But the way dice-pools provide it, is more elegant: You don't have to make any calculations, you can tell the result at a glance. It's especially beneficial to players who are mathematically challenged.

I do concede that it is easier for people with poor math skills (and they do exist!). But at a glance? with 18 D10 rolled? Nope - you gotta sort them, count them...

Dice pools also scale better: you can always add more dice, and a result of zero successes remains a possiblity. Yet, by being able to achieve more overall successes, you can achieve progressively better results that cannot be achieved by characters with a smaller dice pool. Using a percentile system you are limited to a range of 0 to 100%. Trying to replicate the advantage of increasing dice-pools would result in complicated math and most likely something as unwieldy as look-up tables.

But scaling leads to buckets of dice... and do you really need a bigger range than 1 to 100? A highly skilled and lucky character can achieve much more degrees of success than a lower skilled one with % (if degrees of success is something that's being done in that system). I don't see scaling as an advantage here.

Saelorn said:
It depends on how narrow you want your distribution. Rolling three dice is less uncertain than rolling one die, but it's still more uncertain than rolling twenty dice.

Ah, but how narrow do you need your distribution to be? On a 3d6, you have 0.8% or rolling 3 or 18, and 30% chance of rolling "average" (10 or 11). That's pretty tight. Any more dice than that and it's very narrow indeed!

There are lots of ways you could mess with a system, depending on how you want to juggle personal preferences. I'm a big fan of taking average results, instead of rolling large numbers of dice, for example. You could get most of the benefit of an Exalted or Shadowrun system, while making it faster to run, if you cap the number of rolled dice at six and just averaged out the rest. Instead of rolling eighteen dice, you could just count six automatic successes and roll six more dice (although I understand that Exalted, in particular, makes it a pain to determine what the average result should be).

I see what you mean, that would help a bit yes.

aramis erak · Sep 26, 2017

The big problem with many dice pools is that experienced characters soon come to be able to do the nearly impossible on a regular basis.

Take WEG d6 - the starting PC is luky to get 6d... and Very Hard is 30. The main film cast often have 8+dice, and 30 is well into the average range for them.

One dice pool solved this issue - EABA - by capping the number of dice kept It's ranges for dice thrown are almost identical (and supposedly unintentionally), but EABA says "Only read the best 3, or best 4 if you've an advantage for the attribute used."

This solves the escalation issue much better than saying "Novices are just incapable of heroic feats" (as with WEG 1E) or "You just have to get really lucky" (WEG 2E, WWG's Storyteller), or make extra effort and get lucky (Modiphius' 2d20).

Jhaelen · Sep 26, 2017

aramis erak said:
Take WEG d6 - the starting PC is luky to get 6d... and Very Hard is 30. The main film cast often have 8+dice, and 30 is well into the average range for them.

If the results are added together, it's not a dice-pool system. Instead you get the worst kind of flat, bell-shaped result curves that are in all ways inferior to rolling 2 or 3 dice with a high fixed bonus.

Ancalagon said:
I do concede that it is easier for people with poor math skills (and they do exist!). But at a glance? with 18 D10 rolled? Nope - you gotta sort them, count them...

You're making several (wrong) assumptions here to make dice pool systems look worse than they are. As has already been pointed out to you, a good dice pool system is unlikely to require rolling more than about ten dice. And you can definitely tell the number of successes at a glance if you're using dice that have been created for the system, i.e. showing a special symbol to indicate success.

Ancalagon said:
But scaling leads to buckets of dice... and do you really need a bigger range than 1 to 100? A highly skilled and lucky character can achieve much more degrees of success than a lower skilled one with % (if degrees of success is something that's being done in that system). I don't see scaling as an advantage here.

Maybe I didn't express myself clearly enough:
If you're increasing a skill to increase your dice pool, say from 5 to 6, then you can suddenly roll as many as 6 successes. I.e. the range of possible outcomes has increased from 6 to 7. How would you do that with a single roll of percentile dice without requiring a table or matrix?

And this isn't an unrealistic range of outcomes. In dice pool systems you can often spend your extra successes to modify your success in different ways. Options that should only be available to experienced characters will require spending multiple successes. And there's plenty of different types of skill checks: sometimes you need to accumulate a number of successes over several checks to finish a complex task, or they're compared with the successes of your opposition, etc.

Imho, good dice pool systems are among the most elegant RPG mechanics.

Morrus · Sep 26, 2017

Jhaelen said:
If the results are added together, it's not a dice-pool system.

Yes it is. Otherwise I have to completely rewrite WOIN...

The first ever dice pool system was in WEG’s Ghostbusters RPG where you formed a dice pool from an attribute and sometimes a talent, and added the total.

Morrus · Sep 26, 2017

Ancalagon said:
... are we talking about the same thing? This is not what I meant at all.

3d6 instead of a d20 is something Gurps does, for example (and HERO as well). You roll 3d6, you add them up, and compare it to your skill (you try to roll "under", it's a roll low is good system). It's always 3d6 - it doesn't matter if you are good, bad, strong, have a magic sword whatever. Because you roll 3d6 instead of a d20, the chances of rolling an "average-ish" roll are higher than a d20, it's not a flat distribution.

In a dice pool the number of dice is variable (depends on your skills, abilities, favorable circumstances etc) and each dice individually is check to see if it succeeds (exalted: a 7 or higher on a d10). You then add up the number of successes to see how well you did. Some tasks will require multiple successes to be successful - the number of success is the "DC". This is totally different than the 3d6 system I just described.

... what is your definition of a dice pool? I'm genuinely confused.

There are many types of dice pool. Count successes, add up total, etc. There a great Wikipedia page on the subject:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dice_pool

The first ever dice pool system, the Ghostbusters RPG from WEG in the 1980s, involved adding the dice together to achieve a target number.

That inspired possibly the most famous dice pool system in the much-loved d6 system, used by WEG’s Star Wars. Same company as Ghostbusters.

WOIN uses a d6 dice pool system formed by dice for attribute, skill, and equipment, and is rolled against a target number.

If you replace a d20 with 3d6 you’re reliving it with a (small) dice pool.

Ancalagon · Sep 26, 2017

Morrus said:
There are many types of dice pool. Count successes, add up total, etc. There a great Wikipedia page on the subject:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dice_pool

If you replace a d20 with 3d6 you’re reliving it with a (small) dice pool.

erm ... The wikipedia article kind of says no. Let me quote the relevant part:

Some RPGs roll a fixed number of dice, add a number to the die roll based on the character's attributes and skills, and compare the resulting number with a difficulty rating.

This is classic D20. But it is *also* how Gurps operates.

However, in other systems the character's attributes and skills determine the number of dice to be rolled.

And this is the essence of dice pool system. If the number of dice is fixed, it is not a dice pool. The above wiki quote should be edited to make that clearer btw, but I'm not going to go do so now because that would be a bit of a jerk move haha

Anyway, the purpose of my thread was to find out about systems with variable dice numbers for a skill check, I didn't mean to get into a semantics debate - but it's the internet, they always happen

.

Edit: quote error